Vicarious Sovereignty: The Place of Extraterritorial Turkey in the Vision of Bengali Muslims (1890–1917)

Muslim politics in colonial Bengal came to be characterized by an emotive affinity to the “extraterritorial”—i.e. affinity to the Ottoman Empire, whose seat of power was separated from Bengal by nearly six thousand kilometers—at the turn of the twentieth century. According to the logic of nationalism, this affinity signaled Muslims’ deviation from India and foreboded Muslim separatism. Probing into a rich historical archive, I argue that this extraterritorial turn implied neither a pan-Islamic geopolitical agenda nor any renunciation of loyalty to British India. On the contrary, the extraterritorial Turkish Empire represented, for them, a site for enacting what I call “vicarious sovereignty,” a form of authority that neither stems from the nation-state nor is actualized through violence; rather, it rests on the power of what anthropologists call charisma and functions as an empty signifier, which is conducive, above all, to the cultivation of self.